Obama administration speeds endangered species protection orders.

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  Steve Amstrup/U.S. Fish and Wild Life Service, via Associated Press

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  Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

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  George Frey/European Pressphoto Agency

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  Reuters

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  Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

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The habitats of polar bears have become threatened in part because of shrinking ice levels resulting from climate change.

The Interior Department has pledged to make rulings on the endangered status of dozens of species, some of which have languished in a bureaucratic backlog for decades.

 

 

 

 

 

The Interior Department has pledged to make rulings on the endangered status of dozens of species, some of which have languished in a bureaucratic backlog for decades.

 Excerpt from N.Y. Times article:

"Belatedly, the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service is giving them all — and 258 more — a thumbs up or down for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the 1973 law that was among the early triumphs of the environmental movement.

It is evidence of the law’s travails that it took a federal judge to get them to this point.

Under a 2011 settlement of two lawsuits by conservation activists, the wildlife service has pledged to decide the fates of all the backlogged species by 2018. A schedule issued by the service on Feb. 8 promised to decide by September whether to add 97 species to the endangered list, including 70 covered by the lawsuit settlement.

Moreover, the service has finished preliminary work on more than 550 other potential candidates for the endangered-species list, almost all of which will be further evaluated after the backlog is erased.

“They’ve dramatically increased the number of decisions they’re making — both positive and negative decisions, but the vast majority of decisions are positive,” said Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona conservation organization that is a party to the settlement.

It is the most feverish activity on imperiled wildlife in two decades, an improbable feat amid ferocious attacks from conservative critics and in an economy with little money to spare for environmental frivolities."

"Under President George W. Bush, “a lot of the management of the program was taken out of the Fish and Wildlife Service and put in hands of political appointees,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, president ofDefenders of Wildlife and a wildlife service director under President Bill Clinton, said in an interview. One Interior Department officialresigned in mid-2007 amid charges of politicizing the listing process."

Entire article at the link below.